Summary

Tembi Locke is in Sicily, where stories begin with marriage or death, and where her story begins with both. She is breaking into a rural olive grove to scatter her husband Saro's ashes on his family's land. Doing this is an important fulfillment of a request he made before he passed away that she "bring some of [his] ashes to Sicily" (Loc 38). Tembi remembers meeting her Sicilian chef-husband in Florence and reminisces about their love, his final days, and her fresh grief after his recent passing. She has kept her plan to scatter Saro's ashes on his family land a secret from the Sicilian townspeople, for whom cultural differences mean that they would not understand and are unlikely to accept this process. Tempi writes about how she, as a black American woman, was not initially accepted by Saro's Sicilian's family, but that now, she...